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I'm not sure what medical conspiracy theory you're on about, but it's trivially true that emotions have corresponding physiological signals. Electrical signals

I'm not sure what medical conspiracy theory you're on about, but it's trivially true that emotions have corresponding physiological signals. Electrical signals in the brain, hormonal signals to the rest of the body. The understanding of the physiological response to stress goes back at least to the 30s and 40s with the work of endocrinologist Hans Selye, before van der Kolk was even born. Unless I'm missing something, the article you linked seems to give an unproblematic summary of the basic science of the physiological response to trauma. What your link doesn't address are the points brought up by the links I posted, such as van der Kolk’s attempt to revive the disastrous repressed memory theory, his misunderstanding of fMRI studies, his misrepresentation of the research on mirror neurons, his use of the discredited lizard brain idea, etc.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
It seems we agree on all the important facts. You have an issue with van der Kolk, but I cannot comment on that, having never read "The Body Keeps the Score". Gabor Mate, who I have read, does mention numerous occurrences in his career as MD where people had told him that making links between trauma and, for example auto-immune diseases, was "career suicide". Not sure what you make of that.
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  Oh gotcha, sounds good. I am not familiar with Gabor Mate, but it depends on what his theory was. Wikipedia tells me he considers ADHD to be a coping mechanism. So for example if he had a theory that trauma can cause things like ADHD, then I'd say I don't think that particular theory seems to be supported by the evidence. But it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me that two seemingly unrelated complicated things can be linked. It's possible that he got that advice because he felt he was onto a grand theory and the evidence wasn't there for it. Or whatever, who knows. It's possible there is something to say about anxiety/cortisol/stress, neurodivergence, gut micro-biomes, and some autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. There are studies on all of this stuff, but it's all in early stages, we don't know if the statistical effects are even real. And we certainly have no reason to conclude that one set of effects would cause the other.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

It seems we agree on all the important facts. You have an issue with van der Kolk, but I cannot comment on that, having never read "The Body Keeps the Score". Gabor Mate, who I have read, does mention numerous occurrences in his career as MD where people had told him that making links between trauma and, for example auto-immune diseases, was "career suicide". Not sure what you make of that.

ants_everywhere 3y ago
Oh gotcha, sounds good. I am not familiar with Gabor Mate, but it depends on what his theory was. Wikipedia tells me he considers ADHD to be a coping mechanism. So for example if he had a theory that trauma can cause things like ADHD, then I'd say I don't think that particular theory seems to be supported by the evidence. But it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me that two seemingly unrelated complicated things can be linked. It's possible that he got that advice because he felt he was onto a grand theory and the evidence wasn't there for it. Or whatever, who knows. It's possible there is something to say about anxiety/cortisol/stress, neurodivergence, gut micro-biomes, and some autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. There are studies on all of this stuff, but it's all in early stages, we don't know if the statistical effects are even real. And we certainly have no reason to conclude that one set of effects would cause the other.